How Many Toothpicks Does it Take to Build Yankee Stadium?

Stan Munro makes a living building New York City’s most well-known landmarks — one toothpick at a time.

Stan Munro stands behind the Met Life and Woolworth buildings, which he spent months fashioning out of toothpicks. The Chrysler Building towers to his right.

Stan Munro knows the Chrysler Building quite well. Not because he’s a regular visitor, but because he’s built it out of toothpicks. It’s not the only New York City landmark that he’s fashioned out of toothpicks. He’s also completed replicas of Yankee Stadium, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building and many more.

Toothpick projects may evoke memories of third-grade arts and crafts, but this is no grade school hobby for Munro. He scales each structure based on real-life dimensions and incorporates plenty of painstaking architectural details. (He even populated Yankee Stadium with fans and ball players.) It’s clear why his projects, some of which soar higher than his own height, can take months to build. As for the number of toothpicks he uses per project, Munro has no idea. “It has no correlation to the difficulty of the piece,” he explains. “It would be like asking how much paint somebody used to make a painting.”

Munro is a full-time toothpicker and you can view his work in-person at The Assisi Institute in Rochester, Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not Museum in Baltimore and the Museum of Science & Technology in Syracuse. Here are some highlights from his New York City collection.